Global Feminist Film: Diversity on Screen

The Global Feminist Film workshop builds on the project WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (from5to7.com), a platform for women filmmakers and feminist film scholars launched in 2013 by the session co-chairs Sofia Varino and Joy Schaefer. The project includes an annual screening at Bluestockings feminist bookstore and activist center in New York. In addition to the seminar, the session co-chairs will show a special short film program on “Global Feminist Film” at NeMLA 2016.

This workshop debates topics such as the inherent tensions between “World,” “Global,” and “Transnational” cinemas, and the often strategically necessary decision for a feminist filmmaker to be included within a particular “national” cinema in order to attain visibility as a filmmaker or auteur; diversity on screen, and how global feminist cinemas might produce and/or engage with this diversity (or lack thereof) in particular ways; the possibility of articulating a feminist aesthetics and ethics of filmmaking practices; tendencies and trajectories in archives of global feminist film, both in mainstream depositories like the Women Film Pioneers Project, Anthology Film Archives, and the MoMA film collection, and in alternative resources such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives (NYC) or the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir (Paris); how feminist filmmakers, programmers and scholars engage with these archives as researchers, educators, founders, or archivists; situating global cinemas, especially non-Western cinemas, within feminist cultures of film spectatorship, including festivals like FEMCINE in Santiago, Women Make Waves in Taiwan, Cineffable in Paris, the Gender Reel NYU Transgender Film Festival or the UC Davis Feminist Film Festival; and finally, the pervasive issue of funding, and initiatives like Women Make Movies or the Gender Equality Policy of the Swedish Film Institute.